Giant optical activity and Kerr effect in type-I and type-II Weyl semimetals

Abstract

We explore optical activity in thin films and bulk of type-I and type II Weyl semimetals (WSM), and demonstrate the existence of a giant Kerr effect in both. In time-reversal symmetry broken WSM thin films, the polarization rotation is caused by the optical Hall conductivity including the anomalous Hall term. The Kerr angle is found to be $\propto Q/\omega$, with $Q$ and $\omega$ being the Weyl node separation and the optical frequency, respectively. In contrast, the optical activity in the bulk WSM is dominated by axion electrodynamics, which persists even in the Pauli blocked regime of no optical transitions. In bulk WSM, $Q$ acts analogous to the magnetization in magnetic materials, leading to large `polar Kerr effect' (linear in $Q$) when light is incident on WSM surface without Fermi arc states, and the `Voigt effect' (quadratic in $Q$), when light is incident on surface with Fermi arc states.

17 pages with 7 figures

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• Magneto-transport phenomena of type-I multi-Weyl semimetals in co-planar setups
• Nonlinear magnetoconductivity in Weyl and multi-Weyl semimetal in quantizing magnetic field
• Thermo-electric transport properties of Floquet multi-Weyl Semimetals
• Thermal and gravitational chiral anomaly induced magneto-transport in Weyl semimetals
• Strain-Engineered Widely-Tunable Perfect Absorption Angle in Black Phosphorus from First-Principles
• Third order optical nonlinearity of three dimensional massless Dirac fermions
• Signatures of Lifshitz transition in the optical conductivity of two-dimensional tilted Dirac materials
• Chiral anomalies induced transport in Weyl semimetals in quantizing magnetic field
• Dynamic chiral magnetic effect and anisotropic natural optical activity of tilted Weyl semimetals
• Controllable nonreciprocal optical response and handedness-switching in magnetized spin orbit coupled graphene
• Theoretical investigations on Kerr and Faraday rotations in topological multi-Weyl Semimetals
• Magneto-optical Kerr effect and signature of the chiral anomaly in a Weyl semimetal in a magnetic field
• Nonlinear magnetotransport in Weyl semimetal
• Magneto-optical Kerr effect in Weyl semimetals with broken inversion and time-reversal symmetries
• Chiral anomalies in 3D spin-orbit coupled metals: electrical, thermal, and gravitational anomaly
• Photonic Topological Transitions and Epsilon-Near-Zero Surface Plasmons in Type-II Dirac Semimetal NiTe${}_2$
• Optical conductivity of tilted higher pseudospin Dirac-Weyl cones
• Nodal line resonance generating the giant anomalous Hall effect of Co${}_3$Sn${}_2$S${}_2$
• Omnidirectional excitation of surface waves and super-Klein tunneling at the interface between two different bi-isotropic media
• Kerr effect in tilted nodal loop semimetals
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• Quantum Hall effect and optical magneto-conductivity of two-dimensional topological nodal-line semimetals